I was prepared enough to not totally screw things up at my first job. I was an expert in Javascript and reasonably knowledgeable at data structures and how to implement basic web stuff.
I'm now more focused on back end things...AWS, infrastructure, services, etc.
As far as I know, most of my cohort is still working at good jobs.
I also read a ton of books on design patterns, architecture, deployment, ops, etc.
If you're totally new to deployment, I'd do something like this:
* Get comfortable with the basic Unix/Linux commands (basically, to the point where you can navigate the file system and mv/cp/rm files with ease, change chmod permissions, etc.)
* Create a simple webapp in the stack of your choice. Literally a webserver for a site that says 'hello world'.
* Deploy it on Heroku. With their CLI it's like a single command.
* Congrats! You deployed a site! Go on Heroku's management dashboard and take a look at the logs. They won't make much sense, but get a feel for what's going on.
* Go on digitalocean and make a droplet, which is a VM that's running on their servers. Pick the Ubuntu 16.04 droplet. (Note, you can pick 'One Click Apps' which are VMs that come preloaded with the stack of your choice, but don't do that now). Read about how SSH works. Now SSH into your droplet. Cool, now you're connected to your server!
* Learn how to install the dependencies for your webapp. I don't think the droplets even come with git, so you gotta install everything from scratch. Then get your app running!
* From here, keep playing with your webapp. Figure out how to make your server run your updated code. How to add a database. Do it until you're really comfortable with running your site.
* By now you've run into a ton of issues with the site breaking. It's hard to keep your dev env and the live server synced! Start learning about Docker. Dockerize your app and deploy your app to Digital Ocean as a Docker image.
* When you're comfortable with THAT, start learning AWS. Learn what a EC2 instance is, what RDS is, what you can do with S3, etc.
* Finally, deploy to AWS!
You can use the free account tier at Digital Ocean / AWS to accomplish all these tasks.
Good luck and have fun!
I get alumni surveys all the time asking what things they should teach and the one thing that is consistently never on the list is ops/cloud-related training.